Being there, doing that as a full stack developer building appetite.io ,verbs.im. Previously { Early employee at @taptolearn (YC '12), entrepreneur at hover.in (soft-landed), Early employee at Tutorvista (acquired) }
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Friday, October 26, 2007

Shared OPML, and dektop rss reader productivity

Off late i've been adding a lot more blogs from media/ blogosphere (techcrunch 'ish blogs, company blogs , and so on ) apart from the developer blogs that i cherish the most . One of the categories that i have been having a close watch and building on are indian developers who are being there and doing that ; ) You'll most of the individuals mentioned in my post about indian hacker's in the opml file as well . Ofcourse, most of the list are people I would personally know or like to know but as a technology / web geek i think that sharing this list would really help introduce you to a lot of really good blogs.

I'm also surprised why there is'nt any viral site for sharing rss reader opml files ?!(or is it just my ignorance!). So i'm going to upload my opml files once a quarter so that it might be useful to other hackers, entrepreneurs and technology watchers like me .

And here's for an awesome tip . Sure it wont be easy reading up on 1000+ , i'd prefer to take my time and read most of them . (especially if u skip a day or two ! ) SO what i've done is what i think a more leisurely way to read my favourite blogs without the clutter and time constraints .

Here's what i did two days back :I installed a desktop rss reader on my laptop. I imported my google reader opml . Once a day i go online and let it autoupdate . Finito ! now i can take my time, change the themes ,font's ,add rating ,see my reading statistics, custom tags, searches ,bookmarks, even blog from it, and more importantly - take my time to read all the 1000+ feed items ,as and when i want.

step 1: exported my google opml file.im guessing that you are familiar with rss readers, and blogs and rss . If you use a bloglines or a google reader there should be a export subscription /export feeds / export as opml option somewhere. save the file on your system. Here are my google reader opml files.

step 2: downloaded a desktop rss readerI expected a little more from google readers offline operation that used google gears. sadly though it just did'nt work . Moving on, i looked around for a couple of desktop rss readers. ended up on just installin one though called blogbridge . FYI : a nice link that higlights 9 reasons to use desktop readers, and here's another one that tells you how to make your own desktop rss reader. i then imported the opml file, and can choose as to when it should update (either on program startup or when i say to get updates )

i still like to still to maintain / add feeds ,etc to my online rss reader(google reader) since i can access them when im not on either my machine or the laptop. another hassle is that after reading posts from the desktop reader- they wont be 'marked as read' ,but i still think that the move has let me catch up with the 'posts that i always wanted to take time to read' and the 'blogs i never had time to read and so on' ,and all this offline . I think it's worth it thinking /trying it out.